Stephen Maxfield Parrish (Editor)
Coleridge's "Dejection": The Earliest Manuscripts and the Earliest Printings.
Cornell University Press, 1988. First edition. 0801412552 xi/141 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.75", is bound in gray cloth, with stamped black lettering to spine. Book is new. Dust jacket displays light shelfwear, with sunning to spine. Jacket is in mylar cover.
"This book offers a history of Coleridge's great "Dejection" poems and presents the earliest manuscripts and earliest printed versions of those poems, along with the only known manuscript of another of Coleridge's poems, "The Day-Dream."
The first version of "Dejection," dated April 102 bears the title "A Letter to -----" and is addressed  to Sar Hutchinson. In October of the same year, the poem shaped  into a Pindaric ode, addressed to Wordsworth, was publsihed in abridged form. The ode remained incomplete until Coleridge published it in 1817 in "Sibylline Leaves," readdressed to an anonymous "Edmund." Two manuscripts of the "Letter" survive. One has been in the Dove Cottage Library at Grasmere for many years, the other was found in 1977, with "The Day-Dream" attached to it, among a bundle of Wordsworth family papers, and is now also at Dove Cottage.
In his introduction Stephen Parrish traces the early development of the "Dejection" poems, from their genesis in Coleridge's unhappy personal situation through the circumstances of their composition and revision. Reading texts of the recently discovered version of "A Letter to ------" and "The Day-Dream" are presented here for the first time, together with reading texts of a transitional version of "A Lover," the October 1802 and 1817 published verions of "Dejection," and the only verion of "The Day-Dream" published by Coleridge. The volume also contains photographs and transcripts of the principal manuscripts. Where appropriate, a record of variants is providd in form of an apparatus criticus."